Vale of the White Horse

Sunday, 15 May 2016

The landscapes and buildings of the Vale have been captured
in many different ways. Not surprisingly, there is a long tradition of painting
and photographing its views. But in this post I want to look at a more unusual
way in which people have tried to represent the area – model railways.

The best known example of this is the Vale Scene at Pendon Museum in Long Wittenham . This is centred on a fictional Vale
village ‘Pendon Parva’ and attempts to represent an idealised version of the
landscape as it was in the 1930s. As an archaeologist, I have a great fondness
for the loving rendered hillfort. Although, it is at heart a railway layout, as
much thought has been put into representing the landscape and, in particular,
the historic buildings of the Vale, as the railway itself. Nearly all the buildings
shown are based on actual building that stood or stand in the area.

The model itself has a fascinating history – it has its
origins with the modelling work of Roye England, who arrived in England from
Australia in the 1920s. Already deeply involved in railway modelling, he spent
time living in Swindon, close to the western end of the Vale, and he soon fell
in love with the landscape and buildings. His first attempts at modelling the
buildings began in the 1930s, and after a pause due to the war, he set up in
Long Wittenham and established what
became the Pendon Modern Railway Museum in the 1950s. He expanded into new
premises in the 1970s and work began on what eventually became the Vale Scene –
although he died in 1995, work on the scene continues.

It’s a beautiful and committed piece of work- it’s steeped
in a love for a pre-lapsarian landscape and for the railways. I love the way in
which it’s still, and likely always will be, a work in progress. There is
something profoundly meditative about model buildings. This kind of small-scale
act of creation is something I have only tinkered round the edges with, but I
can see how it draws people in. There is an intriguing mix of an insistence on accuracy
when it comes to the rolling stock and architectural detailing, but it is all
set in a fictional condensed countryside setting, which aims to represent all
facets of the Vale, from the Downs with their hillforts and strip lynchets to
the pasture and arable of the vale itself. Of course, it is set in late summer,
with the crops ripe unto harvest and the chalk tracks at their dustiest. In its
own way, the model is part of that distinctly English topographic recording
tradition, which has its roots in the chorographic writing of the 17th
and 18th century, and in the 1930s and 1940s, when the idea of the
Vale Scene was germinating, materialised in the form of the Recording Britain
Project and the National Buildings Record. Indeed, the Vale Scene was initially
intended to capture a landscape and way of life that was seen by Roye England
to be under threat ; his first model was the pub, the Calley Arms in
Wanborough, which was being renovated and updated.

Kingston Lisle - Corfe Castle Line- Ormesby Hall

In its own right, the Vale Scene, indeed the entire Pendon
Museum, is wonderful and worthy of a blog entry. You can imagine my surprise though
when I stumbled across a second public model railway layout which contained
model buildings based on real structures in the Vale. I chanced upon it when I
was visiting Ormesby Hall, a National Trust property in Middlesborough. I’d
taken the family to visit because it was home of the Pennyman family, who I had
an interest in due to their work on social relief schemes in the 1930s, so I wasn’t
remotely thinking about the Vale or model railways. However, at the end of the
usual tramp round drawing rooms and halls, it was a pleasant surprise to come
upon a series of model railway layouts run by Ormesby Hall Model Railway Group. One (Pilmoor Junction) was based on the
East Coast mainline (bah, I’ve never liked the LNER…), the other was clearly a
southern landscape and was in fact based broadly on the branch line from Wareham to Swanage. However,
when looking at it more closely, I realised that some of the buildings were
from elsewhere. Indeed, it turns out that although the man who created the
model, Mr Ron Rising, has set it in Dorset, it also contained model buildings
based on real examples across the south of England, including the Vale. For
example, there is lovely set of cottages based on a group in Kingston Lisle
(see picture).

There cannot be many parts of the country which have been
captured in this form, not once, but twice. There may even be other examples of
Vale landscapes and building lurking in lofts and clubhouses elsewhere in the country.
Why the Vale should have caught the imagination in this way I am not certain.
The originators of the two models, Roye England and Ron Rising, had different
relationships between the Vale, one a local, one not so. In both cases though,
there is this fascinating juxtaposition of incredible levels of detail (in the
Corfe Castle layout all the roof tiles on all the buildings were individually
cut out) with a creative mixing and reorganising of these perfect miniatures
within semi-fictional landscapes. I find this approach to fascinating as, in some
way, it mirrors my own perception and attitude to writing about and exploring
the Vale of the White Horse. I want to focus in on little vignettes, case
studies and keyhole views of the region’s history, yet despite my fascination with the detail, I
can’t help but set them in a landscape that is probably more my own imagining
than reality. The buildings provide the ballast, but the tracks take us somewhere else.

Nice piece of rural industrial archaeology here- the
watercress beds at Letcombe Bassett. Fallen out of use now, but the concrete
blocks forming the beds and leats are still visible on the Letcombe Brook
between Letcombe Bassett and Letcombe Regis. Watercress (Nasturtium officinale) is a native herb
and grows in on cold, running water. In the 19th century there was
quite a trade in it, with many growers in the south of England sending it up to
Covent Garden where it was sold. Elsewhere in Oxfordshire, there were important
beds at Ewelme – there were also beds on the down edge at Ramsbury in
Wiltshire The chalk stream at Letcombe
was also used for growing cress. I can’t find out much about the chronology of
the watercress growing in the village- the beds seem to be shown on the 1st
Edition OS map, but are not marked as such. The beds are clearly labelled
though from the 1870s. The use of concrete for bunds and channels which can
still be seen presumably indicates a phase of 20th century investment.
It was still active into the 1970s and several newspaper reports from the time
write about the threat posed by the drought of 1976, and I think the beds were
still being worked until the 1980s?

Friday, 15 January 2016

Over Christmas I got a chance to go out for a short walk
with my wife and the nippers up at Letcombe Bassett, a village I’d not been to
before. It has got a lovely little church and some good solid box-frame late
medieval box-frame houses (which I'm planning to blog about another time). However, what caught my eye as we headed up
the hill following a footpath past the church was a series of earthworks to the
south of the church. The trusty OS 1:10 000 map did not show the actual
features and it wasn't clear whether the ‘Old Quarry’ label referred to that
area or other adjacent lumps and bumps.

Later on I chased up the earlier OS maps, and nothing is
shown even on the 19th century First Edition map, although it was
clear that the church and the earthwork sat together in a larger roughly
rectangular enclosure defined by field boundaries and the edge of the
churchyard. Pleasingly, with the recent freely available access to Lidar data I
was able to get a better sense of the shape of the earthworks I saw. The lidar
plot showed a roughly square embanked enclosure approximately the same width as
the churchyard.

Stupidly it was only at this point that I thought of
checking the Historic Environment Record (doh!), which indeed flagged up these
earthworks describing them as an enclosure and house platforms of probable
medieval date. I’d suggest that we can go a little further than that- the distinct
smaller embanked enclosure and its juxtaposition immediately next to the church
at the top of the village make it more likely that we are looking at the site
of the manor. The manor of Letcombe
Bassett went through various hands in the medieval period, and ended up in the
hands of Queen’s College (Oxford University) in the mid-16th century.
I've not had a chance to do much research, but there is a College Farm in the
village. I'm guessing that as an absentee landlord, the College no longer
required a manor house, and the Letcombe estates were farmed from College Farm.
This would give the 16th century as a possible point at which the
putative manorial enclosure fell out of use.

Thursday, 7 January 2016

Whilst rifling through the piles
of British Archaeological Reports in the library the other day I came across
Paula Levick's recent Later Prehistoric and Roman Landscapes on the Berkshire Downs (2015). I had to have a peek as I've long flirted with the archaeology of
the Downs. When I did my Masters many moons ago I did a long essay on Iron
Age/Roman field systems on the Berkshire Downs, and my first ever conference
paper (Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference – Reading -1995) was a critique
of Vince Gaffney and Martin Tingle's Maddle Farm Survey (the realisation that
Vince was sitting in the front row did nothing for my first night nerves...).
I'd spent time digging with Oxford Archaeology on the Neolithic/Bronze Age site
at Tower Hill and been tangentially involved with a project at Beedon as well.

However, I hadn't really kept up
to date with scholarship on the area since then late 1990s - and there has been
a lot, particularly with Gary Lock's Hillforts of the Ridgeway project. The discovery
of Levick's volume gave me a serendipitous opportunity to catch up. This blog
entry though isn't so much about the work itself, rather an opportunity to
ponder more generally about how this kind of big landscape archaeology is
framed, with particular reference to the neighbouring Vale of the White Horse.

The report is based on Levick's
PhD carried out in the Dept. of Continuing Education at Oxford, and is a good,
thorough analysis of the Iron Age and Roman landscapes of an area of the
central Downs, which includes the substantial univallate hillfort at Segsbury.
She uses the immensely detailed cropmark dataset generated by English
Heritage's Lambourn Down Mapping Project, which she supplements with Lidar
data, geophysical survey, the traditional historic mapping resources (tithe
maps/enclosure maps etc), as well as some interesting work integrating the
results of metal detecting surveys carried out with the support and oversight
of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The results are a thoughtful reanalysis of
the conventional LBA-RB chronology of the area, suggesting that some areas were
not as empty in the BA as previously thought.

However, reading it, as someone
who now situates themselves as medievalist rather than a Romanist, and someone
with an interest in Vale I became increasingly aware of the incredible
influence of chronological and geographic boundaries on the way these kind of
landscape studies are carried out.

My first qualm is with physical
edges. This work and the Maddle Farm survey both focus on the chalk uplands
with very little engagement with the neighbouring Vale. There are perfectly
good reasons for this- the research agenda of the MVS was to look at the
hinterland of a Roman villa situated within the Downs. In the case of Levick,
the key dataset was the cropmark survey – cropmarks are far better defined on
the chalk downs than they are on the greensands at the Vale-Downs interface.
This inevitably means that the focus of this kind of landscape study is on the area
with the greatest data, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. PhD
theses have to be pragmatic about defining their datasets and study regions.

Yet, the one thing we know about
the use of the Downs in the medieval and post-medieval period is that administrative
units and agricultural regimes crossed the topographic boundaries between
Downland and Vale (between chalk and cheese). The parish boundaries of the
villages along the northern scarp all extend from the greensands up to the top
of the Downs – and had complex patterns of arable and pasture, with the
ploughing up of much of the downland only happening relatively recently. I
don't think there is any a priori reason to assume that these kinds of
relationships did not exist in deeper antiquity. But by focussing in on
specific topographic regions (however understandable) we miss the chance to
draw out this crucial relationship. Inevitably, the different topography has
meant that the archaeological record itself varies significantly, both due to
differences in land-use and agriculture in the past, different geologies and
environmental processes (e.g. colluvium build up etc), as well as the different
impact of medieval/post-medieval post-depositional processes. To some extent,
the Vale of the White Horse survey, Martin Tingle's follow-up to the Maddle
Farm Survey attempted to address this issue, but there was no real integration
of the two data sets.

A second implicit boundary in so
much landscape work is that formed by the Romans. For many archaeologists (and
I include some work I've done myself), the 1st to 4th
century is a conceptual 'fold' in the landscape palimpsest. Many studies run
from the Neolithic through to the Roman period, and others take the early
medieval period as their point of departure. Although there are honourable
exceptions (e.g. Peter Fowler's West Overton work and Chris Gerrard and Mick
Aston's Shapwick project spring to mind, as well as Steve Rippon's Fields of
Britain project) there are all too few attempts to take the longue durée
approach and follow through the long-term narrative presented by the landscape.
There is seemingly an underlying assumption that the arrival of the open-field
systems of the central province in the later Anglo-Saxon period creates a
profound point of rupture, with an erasure of earlier field systems so thorough
that there is a de facto blank slate. This is a pretty major assumption (as the
Fields of Britain project has outlined), but even if it was true, it begs the
question, what field systems and settlement patterns were being used in the
early to mid-Anglo-Saxon period? If there is continuity and development from IA
to RB, why should there not be similar continuity from RB-AS? And crucially,
can we recognise this in the field archaeology? Of course, there are
methodological problems; as with topographic boundaries, the archaeological
footprint varies- most noticeably in the massive decline in datable pottery,
the chronological marker most used for analysing field walking survey and
excavation work. But with the growth of OSL techniques, we should (in theory at
least) be able to move beyond this limitation. There are also other data
sources available, most strikingly AS charter boundaries (of which there are
some good examples from this part of Berkshire). As Paula Levick has also shown
there is also some potential from drawing on PAS data.

There is surely the potential for
a more integrated approach to looking at the landscape of the Down and the
Vale, one that tries to cross these chronological and topographic boundaries.
It would be a challenge bringing together the diverse data sets, but that is
half of the fun of archaeology.

Thursday, 31 December 2015

I've blogged previously on mumming plays - both on this blog (see here) and on another blog I run (see here and here). This entry is following up on this and building on some wider work I'm doing on the distribution of mumming plays. The image below shows a map of the sites of recorded mumming plays within the Vale of the White Horse and its immediate hinterland. Data taken from English Ritual Drama (1967) Cawte, Helm and Peacock

Wednesday, 30 December 2015

Saturday, 3 January 2015

There are quite a few places in England which have
traditions of parading lit tar barrels around the town/village, as part of the
celebrations of New Year (e.g. Allendale) or Guy Fawkes Night (Ottery St Mary;
Hatherleigh). In the past this practice seems to have been quite wide spread,
but has largely disappeared. It turns out that Wantage also had this tradition
in the 19th century.
According to Kathleen Philip’s splendid little book Victorian Wantage in
the weeks before Guy Fawkes night, the local youth acquired big barrels from
the old gasworks, rammed them full of anything that would burn and then on the
night itself, lit them and rolled them around town – one group started in
Newbury Street, another in Mill Street and they all met in the Square. She refers
to the barrels and effigies being hurled around the statue of Alfred – this was
erected in 1877, which give some chronological peg to hook this on to. Philip
says that she found no written record of this tradition, but heard about solely
via local informants – presumably in the 1960s. The 1822 Wantage Improvement
Act explicitly forbade making ‘any
bonfire or burn any effigy or throw or let off any cracket, squib, rocket,
fireball or any other firework’, which suggests that similar practices were
known far earlier in the 19th century.

It’s worth having a look at the section on Ottery St Mary in
Steve Roud’s excellent book The English Year for more on the background of this
wider tradition.

NB: the image is not of Wantage - it's from the Ottery St Mary celebrations